language evolution - Recent trends in English grammar

A lot of questions have been dedicated to how the evolution of English got many constructs of the old either fall out of use, merge, or evolve into different forms but still with 1:1 relation to original. The English of Victorian times was significantly more complex than modern-day English.

But I'm quite convinced that elements of grammar didn't just die out or evolve into uniform counterparts — I'm fairly sure entirely new ones were borne over time, or simple cores were branched out into multiple, significantly different, more complex variants.

Can you identify elements of contemporary English grammar that would simply baffle someone who spoke Early Modern English?

Common, everyday constructs of grammar that don't have simple direct counterparts of the old, or are significantly more complex? New tenses? Inflections where there was none?

Answer

As Barrie mentions, there is little systemic that has changed in English in the last few centuries. Most of the major systemic changes that you might recognise over the last 1000 years, such as the breakdown of the declension system and the simplification of verbal morphology, were probably all but complete by Shakespeare's time or not much thereafter. Some possible candidates of "recent" semi-systemic changes that might sound if not "baffling" at least "very odd" to Shakespearean ears:

• a change in the so-called "raising" behaviour of verbs, so that it is now completely ungrammatical to say "he plays not", and that it sounds much more natural to say "he often plays" rather than "he plays often";


• the frequency with which we now use paraphrases such as "be able to", "have to" etc rather than modals "can", "must" etc;


• there are no new "tenses" as such, but some combinations of elements making up the verb phrase are relative neologisms (e.g. compounds of past passive progressives: "to have been being watched" etc);


• using the 's form with inanimates appears to have been much rarer a century or two ago, so it would probably have sounded very strange to say e.g. "the planet's species", "the book's cover" etc.


• a few other isolated bits of syntax have become more less mainstream whereas they would have been much rarer a couple of centuries ago, e.g. putting elements between "to" and the verb ("to really go", "to fully appreciate", "to not be there"), using analytic comparatives even though synthetic ones exist (e.g. "more cold" instead of "colder").

But on the other hand, these are about as "systemic" as it gets in terms of changes in English over the last few hundred years, and it's probably fair to say that they're not so major as to render the language "baffling" to a speaker either side of the change.